I focus on the strategic, economic and business implications of defense spending as the Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates. Prior to holding my present positions, I was Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at Georgetown. I have also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. I hold doctoral and masters degrees in government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of science degree in political science from Northeastern University. Disclosure: The Lexington Institute receives funding from many of the nation’s leading defense contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and United Technologies.

Shrinking Army Fights National Guard For Vital Combat Helicopters

When the Air Force was split off from the Army to form an independent military service after World War Two, airmen got almost all the planes and soldiers got almost all the helicopters. Ever since then, Army Aviation has been about rotorcraft. There are heavily-armed ApacheApache helicopters for killing enemy armored vehicles, agile Black Hawk helicopters for lifting troops into combat areas, and twin-rotor Chinook helicopters that carry larger numbers of soldiers, supplies and equipment in war zones (Army helicopters typically are named to honor Native American tribes).

And then there are the scout helicopters, called Kiowas, that conduct armed reconnaissance missions vital to the situational awareness of friendly troops. Kiowas have been operating in one configuration or another since the Vietnam era, and the Army has hundreds of them. They were used extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq to pierce the fog of war by finding enemy forces, pinpointing the location of friendly forces, and assessing the tactical situation on the ground. Made by the Bell Helicopter division of TextronTextron, they are an integral part of Army warfighting doctrine and have maintained high readiness rates despite harsh operating conditions.

(Disclosure: Most of the companies building helicopters for the Army contribute to my think tank; some would benefit from the changes described here and others would not.)

Up until last year, Army leaders planned to spend billions of dollars renewing and improving the Kiowas while they searched for a successor. But as the fiscal realities of the 2011 Budget Control Act began to sink in, those leaders decided they could neither afford to fix the Kiowas nor find a replacement, because funding for developing new helicopters and sustaining old ones had been slashed. With the budget law looking unlikely to be repealed anytime soon, they had to find a much cheaper way of getting soldiers reconnaissance essential to their survival in combat.

The idea they hit upon was transferring much heavier Apache helicopters from the reserves to the active-duty force, and teaming them with unmanned drones to meet most recon needs. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but with Congress having legislated across-the-board spending cuts of everything but entitlements, it was by far the most cost-effective option available. The alternative would have been to drastically reduce the number of aviation brigades in both the active force and the reserves, leaving the Army incapable of sustaining combat rotations in future wars. Combat rotation is the process that supports protracted military campaigns by always having a unit getting ready to go and another recovering from battle for each one that is actually in the field.

The new helicopter plan is known within the Army as the Aviation Restructure Initiative. It has a lot of moving pieces, but the bottom line is that it keeps the combat helicopter fleet relevant at a much lower level of expenditure by eliminating anything that isn’t demonstrably value-added for warfighters. To execute the initiative, though, the Army National Guard has to give up all 192 of its tank-killing Apaches and accept a smaller number of Black Hawk utility helicopters in return. The Black Hawk is a more versatile airframe better suited to the Guard’s domestic and overseas missions, however that’s not what National Guard leaders in the nine states hosting Apache units see. They think the active-duty Army is trying to undermine their role in combat aviation.

The question of who operates the Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopter has become a major source of friction between the regular Army and the Army National Guard.(Source: es.wikipedia.org)

The National Guard has unusual political clout because it is both an operational reserve for federal forces and the local militia in each state. The Adjutant General at the state level reports to the Governor unless his or her force has been federally mobilized, and because there are thousands of jobs (and voters) associated with Guard activities, politicians are deferential to Guard concerns. That political influence is reinforced by the fact that the Guard serves as military first responder if there are natural disasters or civil disturbances. When the nation is at war and money is flowing freely to the troops, the regular Army and the Guard usually get along well; but when threats and funding recede, the two institutions tend to fight over funding priorities.

That’s what has happened with the Aviation Restructure Initiative. Guard leaders say they can’t be an effective reserve force unless their capabilities mirror those of the regular Army (and Air Force — there’s an Air Guard and an Army Guard). They also contend that they are a bargain because it costs less to sustain a reservist than an active-duty soldier. The web-site of the National Guard Association of the United States, a lobbying organization that protects Guard interests, states, “For 15% of the Army’s base budget, the Army National Guard provides 32% of the Army’s totaltotal personnel and 32% of its operating forces.” In fact, if you combine the Army National Guard with the Army Reserve (a separate organization) it is actually bigger than the active force — 560,000 versus 510,000.

The leaders of the regular Army don’t deny the Guard has played an important role in sustaining the multi-front war against terror. They just think that going forward, the active-duty force is likely to be more ready and responsive when overseas crises loom. For instance, a soldier in the regular Army is on duty continuously, whereas the National Guard’s web-site states, “training typically requires one weekend each month, with a two-week training period once each year.” Although many members of the Guard have combat experience, they aren’t likely to maintain proficiency in combat skills with only a few dozen training days per year — especially when some of those days are dedicated to non-combat matters such as sexual harassment sensitivity.

Beyond that, the Adjutants General who lead state-level National Guard organizations typically do not command overseas; they are oriented primarily to military needs within their states, like assisting flood victims. So Army leaders think it makes eminent sense to shift Apache gunships out of the Guard for use as armed recon helicopters while putting Black Hawk helicopters in that are better suited to such local emergencies. They acknowledge the Guard is only getting half as many new helicopters as the Army wants to take out, but when the postwar drawdown is completed, the Guard’s aircraft fleet will have shrunk 8% while the regular Army’s fleet will have shrunk 23%. To comply with budget limits, roughly 800 helicopters will be retired.

So far, not one of the National Guard’s state-level commanders has endorsed the Army’s aviation plan. Instead, they have lined up behind congressional proposals to form a federal commission that will assess the future size and structure of the Army. These proposals have been opposed by every senior Pentagon official from the Secretary of Defense to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the Army Secretary to the Army Chief of Staff. They view the commission as a political intrusion into the decisionmaking of military professionals aimed at protecting Guard jobs rather than assuring military preparedness.

The National Guard Bureau that oversees Guard activities at the Pentagon is trying hard to stay out of this fight, but the Guard’s association has been stridently critical of Army plans. Its president, retired Major General Gus Hargett, was quoted in InsideDefense.com stating that, “shifting all of the Army National Guard’s Apache attack helicopters to the active component saves no money while squandering the Total Army’s most experienced Apache pilots and maintainers.” The phrase “Total Army” is an implicit reference to a policy promulgated after the Vietnam War that directed all parts of the Army should be treated as a single integrated fighting force. Guard leaders say the aviation plan is incompatible with that policy.

It certainly doesn’t help the Guard’s case that money provided so reservists could conduct flight training in Apaches has been used for other purposes. But as is so often true of defense debates in Washington, the imbroglio over restructuring Army Aviation isn’t really about merit, it’s about politics. If it were about merit, legislators would recognize that all of the Army’s Kiowa scout helicopters will be gone from the force by 2018 to comply with the Budget Control Act, so failure to move the Apaches to the regular force expeditiously could put the lives of thousands of soldiers at risk. When soldiers deploy to foreign conflicts, nothing is more valuable than having detailed and timely reconnaissance about enemy movements.

The situational awareness afforded by airborne reconnaissance is a key warfighting advantage for America’s soldiers, and the Army has learned over the years that it can’t always count on the other services to pitch in when recon is urgently needed. It’s bad enough that Congress has imposed budget cuts forcing the service to forego upgrading or replacing its existing scout helicopters. If it also delays implementing an alternative solution because of politics, then the day is fast approaching when soldiers could die for lack of timely information about the threats they face in war zones. There are only nine states where the National Guard operates Apache helicopters, but right now their concerns about money and missions are impairing the Army’s ability to prepare for the future.

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